Edit

Share via

Find a memory leak

  • Article

A memory leak occurs when a process allocates memory from the paged or nonpaged pools, but doesn't free the memory. As a result, these limited pools of memory are depleted over time, causing Windows to slow down. If memory is completely depleted, failures may result.

In this section

Article Description
Use perfmon to determine whether a memory leak exists Describes a technique you can use if you aren't sure whether there's a memory leak on your system.
Finding a Kernel-Mode Memory Leak Describes how to find a leak that is caused by a kernel-mode driver or component.
Finding a User-Mode Memory Leak Describes how to find a leak that is caused by a user-mode driver or application.